Reforming Hell

By Marilyn "Mattie" Brahen

In her waking life, Leianna is a 29-year-old single mother living in Philadelphia, but she is psychic, has had astonishing visions, and leads a dual, astral existence in which she is now reunited with Bael, her dark, mysterious lover from another life, 35,000 years ago. More than love is at stake, for Bael is nothing less than one of Lucifer's followers, a fallen angel. Behind the story of their love is the epic of the Fall from Grace, which takes a new turn as an alliance between Heaven and Hell seems a real possibility for the first time in untold millennia. Now Leianna, becoming Queen of Hell, will face an impossible task: if Hell itself is to be reformed, she must first redeem the soul of history's greatest monster -- Adoph Hitler -- and make him weep. Can she save the damned? Should she?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781434442758

Book preview

Reforming Hell

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2009 by Marilyn Mattie Brahen.

Published in 2009 by Wildside Press.

www.wildsidepress.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my friends and family who have been so supportive and understanding as I worked on this novel, especially my husband, Darrell Schweitzer, whose loyalty, love, and editorial feedback are treasured, and my mentor, Ray Bradbury, whose en­couragement has always kept me going whenever the going got tough. Ray, you also hold an extra-special place in my heart.

I would be remiss to not thank my publisher, John Betancourt of Wildside Press, for his support and friendship over the years.

And lastly, I thank my readers who started this journey with my first novel, Claiming Her, and will continue and complete its tale here with Reforming Hell.

—Marilyn Mattie Brahen

October, 2008

*

People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it.

—from The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald, 1872

*

When any religion tries to enforce its superiority with violence, it has lost the battle.

—Marilyn Mattie Brahen

August 30, 2007

CHAPTER 1

Stories in the Garden

I’m looking back from the present. For those of you who never met me, my mortal name is Leigh Ann Elfman. My eternal name is Leianna, given to me 35,000 years ago when I was born to the angels Eve and Michael, their only child.

It’s 2008. Sometimes you have to look back from the present to figure out where to continue telling the story. I left you guys, left off at the very beginning of 1972, and the world was so much easier to take then, when we didn’t have wackos blatantly masquerading as pious vigilantes or a flim-flam president. I know there were other sleazy presidents in the past. But our current brazen bozo in the Big House is beyond sane belief.

Back then, we didn’t have religious bigots telling us their beliefs were more important than democratic freedoms. We didn’t have extremists who kill over cartoons, films or books, unable to handle justified criticism of their distinctly unspiritual behavior.

It’s 2008. I’m 60 years old, my auburn hair is streaked through with silver, my face, I’m told, is still youthful despite a few new pounds filling out my chin and cheeks, and my brown eyes are still my best feature, even with a few lines at their corners. So much has happened in 36 years. Eve, as my mortal mother, Miriam Elfman, is 80 years old, and according to my spirit master, Quatama, also known as the Buddha, this is Eve’s last mortal lifetime. She’s outlived the rebalancing of humanity’s DNA, after the damage caused by the first Fall from Grace, when she and her brother Adam were trapped on Earth and interbred with mortals. That mixed angelic and human genes, but the damage has now been reversed. A subtle evolution will begin taking place; mankind will become a new, improved species.

Bear with me here. I know humanity still seems to be off its rocker. The last eight years I’ve been cynical, badly heartbroken, and angry. I get to do something about my anger. I’m the Queen of Hell now. I get to judge those who really sin in the eyes of the Creator. This doesn’t always match the perpetrator’s religious belief. God doesn’t particularly care what religion you are. Many souls who rise to the heavens are extremely perturbed by this at first. Then they realize that nobody’s listening to their complaint. Judgment really hinges on ethics and spirituality, not on what religion we follow.

I’m having one of those days when I can barely make it through without my muscles aching, just getting through the day job and cleaning up the dinner dishes. I tumble into bed, fall asleep, and wing it up to the eighth physical astral plane. This is one of the high heavens I’ve got access to, something you might not think I’d have, since I’m the Queen of Hell. But God asked me to take that position, to relieve Lucifer of his duties.

Few mortals even know about that change in management Down Below, or all the other changes there, that I get to do the judging. Actually I’m waiting for some really large rats, human ones, to come my way. You don’t just lie your way into world chaos, destroying other lives impertinently, and not expect to be called to judgment. On the other hand, Heaven doesn’t approve of fanatical religious leaders killing in the name of God. None of these people are going to Heaven. They’re heading for a total isolation cell for a thousand years or so to teach them the value of a human life.

I did freak out insanely in the beginning, when judging the 9-11 bombers, and initially stooped like the Furies to their violent level. But then I calmed down, put them back together, and it’s been isolation cells ever since for each of those misguided fools. And, believe me, isolation hurts a lot more than physical punishment. YOU try being denied all sensation, stuck in total blackness, with nothing for reference, nothing visible, audible, sensory or structural, just hanging in a void for even two days. Oh, yeah, you can hear yourself scream.

Hell is tidier and much more logically run these days. We even have social workers and behavioral therapists on our staff.

And then there’s my second job: President of the High Council of Heaven. I actually asked to be relived of that duty in 2003. They let me go for two years, and then told me I had to preside again.

I don’t like it. All these well-meaning people come up to Hea­ven to complain and half the time they want me to do what those zealous Muslims insisted Denmark should do: pass legal judgment based on one specific religion. I’ve had to educate both crowds of astrally-projected Muslims and throngs of out-of-body Christians and Jews, especially the orthodox believers, explaining that in Hea­ven we don’t bend rules to suit mortal religious beliefs. The Hindus, Buddhists and pagans have less trouble understanding that Heaven has no secular restrictions. Or perks!

Like the group that recently came, including that nauseous woman who kissed her son and sent him off to blow himself up, along with other children. They demanded that the suicide bomb­ers be returned to the heavens and that the 70 virgins attend them. I dearly wanted to tell them that the 70 virgins married nice, peaceful boys whose mothers brought them up right. But I didn’t. I only told them that their sons had committed murder and were not expected in Heaven anytime soon.

They didn’t like that answer. They started clamoring and crying out to M—, but M—, though he sits on the High Council along with me, cannot change Heaven’s rules to fit human delusions. He told them, what many of their eminent scholars had told them: that they were interpreting Islam wrong. When they heatedly accused him of being an impostor, he took it stoically, his eyes sad. Later on, they realized their error and sent apologies to him, which he accepted. I told him—to cheer him—that if Jesus appeared on Earth today, some people would probably demand to see his driver’s license.

So now I wing my way upward to the eighth plane and rather than stop at my home there, I go straight to the Garden, heading to my favorite part, where the fragrant flower beds extend seemingly for miles. I especially love the hyacinth’s sweet aroma. When I arrive, J.C., Quatama and M—are already waiting for me.

They want to talk to me. I knew J.C. 35,000 years ago, before I ever incarnated on Earth. His name was Yeshua then. He and Quatama were both my spirit masters, when I first lived as Leianna in Eliom.

You’re probably more familiar with Eliom as Eden and with Quatama as Gautama Buddha. I still think of and spell his name as Quatama. He’s reached Nirvana and is one with everything, and knows me beyond my own current knowledge of myself. He allows whatever will help the world reach its own Nirvana.

M—is, of course, the prophet of Islam. I know that Muslims aren’t supposed to portray him, but I’m not a Muslim, and this isn’t a portrayal . . . I’m telling a true story. But out of respect to him and his followers, I am only using his initial in place of his name.

M—was the previous Keeper of the Earth before me. Before him it was J.C. and before that it was Quatama. The Keeper, in theory, watches over the world and leaves some legacy to the Earth and its people, a legacy which helps to keep both the Earth and mankind balanced. I haven’t chosen my legacy yet.

In 1971, when Quatama first told me that I was the current Keeper, I asked him who the previous Keeper had been, who had symbolically handed me that baton. But M—felt I wasn’t quite ready to learn his identity. I knew nothing about Islam.

Since then I’ve learned that the name M—, in Arabic, means one who is praised, an honorable name, but he isn’t just any M—, he’s The M—. I also had no idea that, for a very long time, two of my dear astral friends, Ali and his wife Fatima, were M—’s son-in-law and his daughter. At first I was upset when I found all of this out. I was in no way going to kow-tow to anyone’s religious superstar. But Ali and ’Tima calmed me down and helped both M—and me to compromise and trust each other. They are a blessing in my eternal life.

Yeshua, called Jesus by most of today’s modern world, lets me affectionately call him J.C. I never call him Jesus. During his one earthly lifetime—his name in Hebrew was Yeshua—I had both the honor and sorrow of being his mother. Today our roles are slightly reversed. He calls me Little Sister, and I still call him Yeshua.

When M—came forward and identified himself after September 11, 2001, I had my hackles up, my back against the wall, with radar on full alert.

I needed to let him know that I was not subordinate to him, that I owed him nothing that I didn’t wish to give out of my heart’s true desire, when he came around and told me that he had been the previous Keeper.

M—couldn’t understand why Allah would now give that re­sponsibility to a divorced Jewish-American woman from Northeast Philadelphia. He complained to Quatama that if I hadn’t the simple courage to face my own destiny, it didn’t seem likely I’d ever leave any legacy to the world as great as Islam. The only reason, he said, that he accepted my becoming the Keeper was because Allah willed it.

When M—added in a gravelly tone, I will have to strive to understand how such a thing could be, that ruffled my spiritual wings. I very calmly looked up at him and said, Well, we’re apparently going to find that out now, aren’t we? He understood exactly what I meant, because when you are in spirit, your feelings are heightened by your words, and he very quietly replied, You are being an irritating woman.

No, I’m not, I told him. "I think you’re uncomfortable with my being a woman."

For years, we verbally sparred back and forth, neither of us gaining or conceding an inch. I read about one-third of the Koran and found contradictions in it: compassion and cruelty, spiritual tolerance and religious prejudice. Other books of religion also contradict themselves, while insisting they’re the last word from God. God’s absolute word? Many religious passages are not about what God has to say to humans, but what humans say to God, asking God to sanction their behavior unconditionally, and then insisting that God does so. Who could prove this except by faith? If the sanctioned behavior is harmful to us, shall we blame God for it or say our prayer went unanswered? If the sanctioned behavior harmed others, are we denying our own responsibility for our violence, and blaspheming when we call it God’s will? Humans fight for human reasons. Humans wrote these religious works. Perhaps some passages were inspired by God, but I can’t consider them absolute.

Years ago, I decided never to join any mortal religion, including Judaism, but I still study spiritual texts, believe in God, and have my own philosophy. I call it Universophy, which is not a religion. The world doesn’t need any more religions. It needs bridges to connect these beliefs in peace.

In 2006, M—and I had a breakthrough. We simultaneously realized hostility was useless. He accepted my individuality and I accepted his, and we learned to deal with our differences honorably, even affectionately. Never angrily. We realized if his legacy was to survive, he would have to sincerely help me with mine.

The hyacinths are staggered with rows of geraniums, tulips and borders of ageratum. A mild spring permeates the Garden today. M—waits for me, holding a large clay pot, thick with pinkish orange blooms, which he offers me. Quatama and Yeshua materialize behind him. M—explains: For your house on the eighth plane. I know you like begonias. They are from my garden.

M—lives on the eighth physical astral plane with his wife Aishah. When he was alive, she was his third wife. Fatima has told me that her father had nine wives then. She didn’t expect me to find this extraordinary, as I myself have more than one astral husband now and our astral group marriage also includes Sharlan, the only other sister-wife in it.

As far as I know, Aishah is M—’s only wife now. When we were introduced, she was polite but taciturn with me, serving us coffee in M—’s vast garden, standing off to one side while her husband talked with me. I asked him if she wanted to join us, and he said no, she had no reason to. Yet I knew that she could hear our conversation, standing near us at the edge of the patio, by the back door of their spacious, single-story home, as if awaiting her husband’s further instructions.

But the woman he was instructing was me, in the history of Islam, beginning with his meeting with my eternal uncle, the angel Gabriel. My uncle Gabriel verbally dictated the Koran to M—, who wrote it down and brought it to his people.

During those lessons, the pot of coffee stayed ever full, fragrant and warm, even though we poured generous cups. A plate of sweet pastries filled with pistachio nuts also sat on a plate nearby, but these did not replenish themselves, to my chagrin, because they tasted divine. When the plate lay bare, I sighed, and then Aishah appeared, a fresh plate in her hand. She laid it down, took away the empty one and smiled briefly at me. And M—murmured, My wife appreciates your compliment to her baking skill.

Today I accept M—’s gift, the pot of the sturdy begonias, taking it in my own hands. Thank you. They’re beautiful.

A white, wrought-iron table and four chairs appear beside us. I place the begonias, as a centerpiece, upon it and sit down. Yeshua and Quatama also seat themselves, and M—sits directly across from me. He clasps his hands and speaks: "The time has come for me to choose whether to guide my people toward change and its acceptance or to stand behind those who reject it, who insist rigidly upon the old values and the immutability of the law.

The problem, of course, is that sharia is applicable only on Earth and only for Muslims. Allah is most tolerant and generous toward all good-hearted humans in the afterlife. He glances at Quatama, who smiles but says nothing. "The Seraphim tell me that my choice will be influenced by you, Leianna, by decisions you have made before and those you will make in the near future, and that these decisions will decide what your legacy will be. And so, I cannot make my own choice until I understand yours.

"I need you to begin instructing me in the story of your current life, mortal and astral: what you do, who you love, your challenges, dreams and hopes. And I need to understand the purpose of this Alliance, which Allah has asked you to create between Heaven and Hell. Who benefits from it? I have no knowledge of Hell. The pious never lived and ruled there until now . . . until you."

Where do you want me to start? I ask him. What happened yesterday creates today and influences tomorrow. To answer you fully, I’d have to backtrack into the past.

M—considers. "I now know the truth of Lucifer’s fall, and how Gabriel’s brother, Michael, was your angelic father, and that Eve was Michael’s wife and your mother, when you lived among the angelfolk in Eliom, before your incarnations on Earth.

"I know that Adam, your other uncle, was Eve’s brother and not her spouse, and how Adam and Eve trespassed on Earth and were trapped there. And how the obedient angelfolk willingly joined the endless cycles of incarnations on Earth to rebalance the damaged genetic code altered by the hybrid offspring of Eve and Adam.

"I also understand now how Lucifer’s rebellion over this caused him, his family and his followers to be flung into Hell, and how you and your betrothed—Lucifer’s son, Bael—were separated for 35,000 years.

"Quatama also explained why Heaven allowed your reunion with Bael in 1971, that they wanted you to form this Alliance between his father’s dark realm and Heaven’s glorious light.

"What I haven’t learned is the aftermath, what led up to Lucifer’s release from Hell, and what circumstances allowed you to take his place. Is there really a reform movement in Hell, and can any of it be taken seriously? Can you succeed in this at all, and how could it possibly benefit our world?

You must also enlighten me as to your plans for your mortal life, since you are Earth’s current Keeper, regarding the legacy you propose to give to the Earth as its Keeper.

Sudden silence. Both Quatama and Yeshua still sit quietly, al­though Quatama has a mirthful look on his face. As if to say, and you thought I put you through your paces before!

Finally, I respond to M—’s daunting questionnaire. You’re asking for a lot. Trying to tell it only from my personal viewpoint won’t let me express what other people, whose lives intertwined with mine, also experienced. May I tell it through their eyes as well, as they told me, but in their individual voices, as a storyteller would? I’ll try to be as detailed as I can.

M—smiles at me thoughtfully. "Then pretend you are Sche­herazade. Tell me the stories as she would. When all of the tales are told, perhaps we will greet our future with greater compassion and clearer understanding. Inshallah."

God willing, I agree.

M—and I are to meet each night, here in the Garden. There I will spin each tale and weave each into a tapestry that will hopefully reveal a better fate for all of humanity and the good, green Earth we share.

May the ending bring healing to all that dwell upon it.

CHAPTER 2

What Went Before

January, 1977. Leigh Ann would always look back on that year as a major crossroad in her astral life, while her mortal life continued on its mundane way. She was twenty-nine-years-old, and her son Daniel, six. Her sister, Ginnie, was twenty-four, and their brother Rick (no longer called Fred by anyone, family or friend . . . he had achieved that goal) was nineteen. Their mother, Miriam Elfman, was forty-nine, and their father, Bill Elfman, was fifty-four. Their cat, Lucy Angelina, was about halfway through her sixth (human) year, although in cat years, she was older than Leigh Ann and probably much wiser. Her fur was black, as was her nose, and her eyes were a deep emerald. She was pampered by the family, put on the highest of feline pedestals, having in 1971 alerted the family to a smoldering fire in the basement before it could ignite the heater and blow up the house and endanger them.

They all still lived on Glenview Street in Northeast Philadelphia. Rick had just graduated from Northeast High School and was working part-time in Bill Elfman’s plumbing and heating business, while taking college courses in computer programming. Ginnie had received her nursing degree and was employed at Hahnemann Hospital, working a 4:00 P.M. to midnight shift. Leigh Ann had a new job, working for an accounting firm as a secretary. Daniel, bright but boisterous, was enrolled in the Paley Day Care Center, where he also attended kindergarten. Paley also had an arrangement with the nearby elementary school, Farrell, and Daniel would start first grade there in September.

This is how the year began in the everyday waking world of Leigh Ann Elfman, she and her family living their mortal lives, heading to where the future led them.

But after midnight, as her physical body slept, Leigh Ann continued her eternal existence as Leianna. She was torn by her love for two unique men, both immortal: her original betrothed, Bael, and her spirit guide, Terence Dearborn.

Bael had fallen with his father, Lucifer, into Hell and had become his second-in-command. Leianna’s plea, to be allowed to go with Bael, had been denied by their Creator. Instead, she incarnated on Earth along with other angelfolk compliant to their Creator’s Will, rebalancing mankind’s damaged DNA.

Leianna’s eternal mother, Eve, and Eve’s brother, Adam, had disrupted that genetic blueprint. They disobeyed the Creator and visited Earth in the early days of Cro-Magnon man, despite being told that the Creator’s new planet was forbidden to the angels.

The angels had been granted a distant glimpse of that young planet and, safely enclosed in celestial winds, were carried into space, well above the blue and green world, far enough away from its instability. The winds then returned them to Eliom, their own dimension with its village, its beautiful Garden, its prairie, woods and glistening shore. But Eve and Adam, believing they could quickly travel to and view the planet’s surface and swiftly return to the winds, alighted on Earth and underwent a strange ­meta­morphosis. Their angelic clothes disintegrated, and their bodies changed cellularly from immortal to mortal flesh. They became hybrids, half-angelic, half-human, and were trapped on Earth until mortal death released them.

Captured by Cro-Magnon hunters, Eve became its leader’s second wife, and, as the clan grew, Adam formed his own clan. They bore and sired children with their mates. Those offspring, including Eve’s twins, Cahn and Ahbel, raised by Adam when she died in her last childbirth, introduced angelic DNA into Earth’s mortals, changing their genetic future.

After her mortal death, Eve returned to Eliom, to her angelic husband, Michael, and their daughter, Leianna. But the war in Heaven soon separated them all again.

Bael vowed to return from Hell to find Leianna and claim her as his wife. In 1971 they were reunited, unaware that Heaven had planned this as an alliance between Heaven and Hell, to end their opposition and work to heal humanity’s faults.

Hell would be reformed. Or so Leianna was told by her spirit master, Quatama. Five years had passed since Bael, his older brother Ashtoreth, Leianna, and Terence Dearborn, a dead British composer, who also loved Leigh Ann, had first agreed to act as ambassadors. But Hell’s rulers had steadily refused to accept the Alliance and Heaven’s goals.

This formidable challenge seemed more likely to fail than achieve the smallest measure of success. Lucifer had demanded that his first-born, Ashtoreth, and his second-born, Bael, come to their senses. He blamed Leianna’s eternal parents for his disgrace: Michael, for not siding with him in his rebellion, and Eve for submitting to God after Lucifer had risked everything to save her and the other Eliomese from the Creator’s manipulative and unrelenting control.

For five years now, Lucifer had ridiculed his sons’ fatuous claim that they were Hell’s ambassadors to Heaven. He tried to persuade them to abandon Leianna. When they refused, Lucifer suggested corrupting her to bring about her own fall from grace. She could be with them in Hell for all eternity. They refused that suggestion as well. Lucifer raged, while his youngest son, Azmodeus, sneered at his brothers. He disliked Leianna and her influence on them as intensely as Lucifer did. Their mother, Affaeteres, said nothing, for Hell had long ago crushed her, and she rarely gave advice.

Bael and Ashtoreth backed off. An uneasy truce developed in that fifth year between Lucifer and his eldest sons. They went about their duties and refrained from mentioning Leianna. Lucifer never questioned their absence on certain nights from Hell, while know­ing full well that they were with her on the upper planes, and that Heaven had permitted his eldest sons to enter its gate, to tempt Lucifer with the Alliance, and with the false promise of his own redemption and return from exile.

A sly and crafty lure, one he would never snap at.

And so Bael and Ashtoreth reported their father’s denial to Leianna, who felt their task might well be hopeless, and to Qua­tama, who quietly smiled at them and asked that they be patient with Lucifer.

And Terence Dearborn paid scant attention to the whole Alliance business, believing it would either succeed or fail, while his business was to help Leigh Ann’s earthly existence have value and purpose. There were many ways to contribute to one’s world in a given lifetime. Leianna had helped him to recover his lost musical compositions after his death. Together, they had attended the debut of his symphony, sonata and nocturne at the Philadelphia Academy of Music in January, 1972. Terence, of course, had been incognito, invisible to both the performers and rest of the audience, but his final legacy had been salvaged and preserved for posterity.

Leigh Ann had musical talent; he was helping her master the guitar, and she enjoyed creating songs. Perhaps she could aid her world through music? He loved her with an intensity he’d never felt for any other woman. He knew she also loved him. But she felt an equal but different love for Bael. Terence had stepped back from that, allowing Bael to win her. Terence had agreed to a platonic relationship with Leianna, for anything more would cloud his judgment as her spirit guide. Her happiness came first. Bael brought her happiness. Terence would never deny her that.

This was the tangled web of love, hope and the desire to move onward, of anger, hate and the refusal to change, that marked the beginning of 1977. But Leigh Ann Elfman’s mortal life, and her immortal life as Leianna, was about to change forever.

CHAPTER 3

Surprising Lucifer

Lucifer first heard the distorted version of Eve and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eliom, a dimensional world parallel to Earth but not on that planet, and his role in it as the serpent that corrupted Eve, almost 30,000 years before this night. This story of Earth’s first man and woman, of the snake tempting the woman to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the woman beguiling her husband to taste the forbidden fruit, both intrigued and infuriated Lucifer.

The tree, its fruit and the snake were pure fantasy, merely symbols masking the ultimate truth.

But mortals repeated the tale through the ages as their hearth fires cast shadow and light on the walls of their caves and huts. They added the tale of Cain and Abel, also distorted, for the twins had not been Eve’s first-born, and certainly not Adam’s get. Adam had raised them after Eve’s mortal death, causing the confusion over their parentage. Cwuh had sired them on her.

Lucifer had long ago ceased to be mystified by humanity’s need for its religious symbols, although it still amazed him when they took their symbols at face value, as gospel.

Lucifer’s rebellion, neither cold-blooded, nor furtive, had been passionate and honest. He sneered at the hidden sexuality in the image of the snake tempting Eve. He and Eve had been dear friends. He had never seduced her or cuckolded her husband Michael, once loved like a brother. Lucifer, before he fell from Heaven, had been faithful to his wife, Affaeteres.

Five thousand years after conquering the astral wilderness of Hell and building his kingdom, Lucifer heard the first mortal chants of the Garden, naming him the serpent within it. The reptile was maligned on Earth, despite having no greater or lesser need to survive than any of Earth’s other creatures. Lucifer decreed that all snakes in his kingdom were to be treated with respect, for there were snakes and other animals in Hell. Hell had evolved like any other world in the Creator’s universe. Snakes were native to Hell, Earth and Heaven.

But he would not abide any artistic depiction of the limbless creature in his kingdom and banned the snake’s image and his association with it.

Hell’s artists grumbled over Lucifer’s proclamation, but none dared defy it. His throne room where he now sat, awaiting his eldest sons whom he had summoned, held many fantastic images but contrary to the paintings of many mortal artists, nothing serpentine. He had decorated it with images and symbols of his fall from his lost homeland, Eliom.

The right arm of his marble throne, as it faced the vast hall from the smooth, black granite dais, flowed into an eagle at rest, its eyes glaring and its beak opened threateningly, as if daring any to disturb it. The left arm segued into a crouching wolf, ears flattened and teeth snarling. The tall back of the throne held, on Lucifer’s right, the standing profile of a proud, bull oxen, its tail at the end, its bovine head toward the center, turning to gaze coldly at those who stood before the dais. To its left, padding toward the oxen as if the beasts might meet in the middle, a powerful lion also turned its head to face those Lucifer surveyed from his throne, both the willing and the unwilling, its countenance harsh.

The throne sculptures represented the four Seraphim who disgraced Lucifer during Eve’s trial and after it in Eliom, a reminder of his vow to one day face them again and win their atonement.

Lucifer savored the grandeur about him. Six, thick, marble, gold-veined pillars, three on each side of the central reception floor, rose up to support left and right balconies. A palace guard stood before each pillar, dressed in the manner of Roman soldiers in the reign of Tiberius, Lucifer’s elite. Six more guards stood rigidly at attention: two before the elaborately carved, gold and jewel-encrusted, central throne room doors, two unseen from the throne at smaller entrances under the balconies, and two more stationed at private doors that led to and from the dais.

Below the balconies were the galleries, open areas with shadowed recesses, once lit by lamps filled with sweet oil, now replaced with softly glowing electrical light fixtures jutting from the wide, wooden, balcony support beams. Displayed upon the gallery walls, extraordinary paintings, ten feet in height and width, portrayed the long ago expulsion of Lucifer and those he championed from Eliom, their struggle to survive in Hell, and their triumphant conquest and taming of its wilderness.

Lucifer leaned forward on his throne, fingering the hard sculpted fur of the stone wolf impatiently. He stood up and strode abruptly down the three wide steps, descending the dais, and briskly over to the first painting adorning the left-hand wall. In it, rebel angels captured by the winged Seraphim were lifted into the roiling cloud above the village green in Eliom, where Lucifer had earlier argued heatedly against the incarnation of the angelfolk on Earth. The complaisant angelfolk were shown in a wide circle around the green, separated from the disobedient angels by